


Joinery

by scribefindegil



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Ficlet, Found Family, finale fic, happy endings, my boy has a long and happy life and also a long and happy afterlife, story and song spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-18
Updated: 2017-08-18
Packaged: 2018-12-16 19:20:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11835342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribefindegil/pseuds/scribefindegil
Summary: Magnus Burnsides goes back to Raven's Roost and rebuilds, and loves, and lives, and then, eventually, dies.Glimpses of the intervening years.Spoilers for the Balance Arc finale!





	Joinery

Going back to Raven’s Roost didn’t hurt as much as he’d thought it might. It was easier to rebuild when the whole world was rebuilding.

It was still hard. He cried the first time he saw the ruins, and then he wiped the tears from his eyes and broke ground.

He helped with the construction team that stabilized the remaining pillars, that cleared out the rubble and made sure everything he built would be on firm foundations. It was the first time he’d had firm foundations in over a hundred years. There was something satisfying about driving the first strut deep into the ground, about having strong earth beneath him and the work of his hands around him as he built himself a home.

When he first went back, he wasn’t quite sure what he was planning to do there. He moved all the equipment from his Pocket Workshop out into one of the rooms and sat on his bench and stared at it, turning his favorite whittling knife over and over in his hands.

He couldn’t go back to woodworking. Not full time. Even if he gave it a different name, trying to build furniture here would wear him down, press him in his own memories like a vice. He couldn’t stop woodworking either, but it was relegated to the evenings. He gave his work away–to his friends, to his neighbors, to anyone who needed a carved duck or a fine chair.

Johann came before the idea for the Hammer and Tails. He was already a few years old before Magnus adopted him–still srpy, but with a speckling of grey around his muzzle. (Taako balked when he first visited. “Did they run out of puppies?” he asked, levitating away from the dog’s enthusiastic greeting, and Magnus didn’t understand the concern in the elf’s face until years later when he started finding grey in his own hair and Taako’s face went sorrowful when he thought Magnus wasn’t looking).

When Magnus came up with the name for the Hammer and Tails, he laughed. Julia would have laughed too, her face lighting up and showing off the chipped tooth she’d gotten in a wrestling match with the blacksmith’s daughter. For a moment he paused, wondering if it had been a bad idea to come back. Then he thought about how Carey would probably laugh with him too, so he sat down and wrote her a letter and told her to visit whenever she was in the neighbourhood. She and Killian showed up two weeks later.

He filled in his life with his school, with his friendships. All the IPRE crew had an ongoing contest over who could spoil Merle’s kids the most, and although Lup always won Magnus put in a good show. Angus stayed with him during the school holidays and next Candlenights he handed Magnus an inexpertly-carved wooden duck. “Carey gave me secret lessons,” Angus said. “I told her I could probably just ask you to teach me but she seemed very excited about the secrecy aspect. I know you gave me that knife and I just thought I should … know how to use it.” Magnus hugged him and put the duck in pride of place on his mantlepiece, along with the Taako Brand postcards his itinerant friends sent him and a few of Lucretia’s smaller paintings.

Raven’s Roost regrew, slowly but steadily. People from the surrounding fields came back to build and set up shop. Soon Merle’s children weren’t the only ones Magnus was honorary uncle to. After a few years, Magnus went from being the Local Hero to the man known for his dogs and his rib-cracking hugs. A steady stream of visitors stopped at his house on official business from the Bureau of Benevolence and both the continent’s most prominent magic schools, and sometimes groups of children in Xtreme Teen Adventures! t-shirts would come to study with him and learn about strength. The sight of Magnus laughing as a gaggle of teens teamed up to pull him down onto the grass outside his house was common enough that his neighbors had long ago stopped remarking on it.

He was happy. And he stayed happy, for a long, long time.

***

“Did you mean it?” said Julia, after Magnus finished telling her the story of everything she’d missed.

“Mean what?”

“That you were sorry to keep me waiting.”

“I mean …” Magnus fumbled for words, and Julia laughed. He could see her chipped tooth and he could feel her hands tight around his. He squeezed, and she squeezed back.

“I missed you,” he said. “I missed you so much. So in that sense, yes, I meant it with everything I have, but … on the other hand … I wouldn’t want to have missed any of that. So … I’m sorry that you had to wait, but I’m not sorry I lived long enough that you had to.”

Julia smiled.

“Good,” she said, and hugged him so tight she lifted him off the ground.


End file.
